Touch panels have become popularized gradually in people's life along with the rapid development of display technologies. Compared with a traditional display only capable of providing a display function, a display with a touch panel can enable a user to exchange information with a display control host, so the touch panel can completely or at least partially take the place of a general input device so that the existing display is capable of both displaying and touch control. At present the mostly widely applied touch panels are capacitive touch panels, capacitive touch panels are categorized into in-cell, oncell and attached capacitive touch panels by their relationships between themselves and Thin Film Transistors (TFTs) and Color Filter (CF) substrates, where the in-cell capacitive touch panel has become predominant in the development of touch control technologies due to its high integration, low thickness, superior performance and other advantages.
As illustrated in FIG. 1, a capacitive touch panel in the prior art includes a plurality of drive electrodes Tx, e.g., Tx1, Tx2, Tx3, Tx4, etc., disposed parallel to a first direction, and a plurality of detect electrodes Rx, e.g., Rx1, Rx2, Rx3, Rx4, Rx5, Rx6, etc., disposed parallel to a second direction. In a touch scan phase, the drive electrodes Tx are scanned by a drive scan signal row by row, and with a larger size of the touch panel, there are a larger number of channels to be scanned together with Tx, so it will take a longer period of time to scan Tx. For the in-cell touch panel, touch control and display has to be performed in a time-division manner in order to reduce interference with a display signal; and for a display Integrated Circuit (IC), a sufficiently long period of time has to be spared for touch control, and the period of time required for touch control is in direct proportion to the number of channels to be scanned, so that if a larger touch panel is provided with a larger number of channels, then there will be a longer period of time required for touch control and a shorter period of time spared for display scan, but the period of time spared for display scan can only be compressed to some limited extent, and consequently the capacitive touch panel in the prior art might be limited in its size of the panel which can be supported.
In summary, the design of the drive electrodes and the detect electrodes in the prior art might be greatly limited in its application to the touch panel with a large size.